A Note on Jews and Feminism

My recent review of Janice Fiamengo’s The Goddess that Failed cited her summary of a study by four Israeli social psychologists of a personality trait they called “TIV,” or the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood. Fiamengo considered it valuable as a description of a kind of woman frequently met with in feminist circles, and I agree. I also noted in my review that the Israeli origin of the researchers might not be an accident: readers of this site are familiar with the salience of victimhood within the self-concept of many Jews. I did not explore this question in the review, because I wished to keep the focus on Prof. Fiamengo’s ideas, but will try to address it briefly here.

Here, as a reminder, is Fiamengo’s summary of the TIV type:

Passionate belief in one’s victimhood creates an identifiable personality type, one that ruminates on grievance and interprets all experiences through the victimhood lens. Belief in victimhood need have no correlation with actual experience of victimization. The victim personality is characterized above all by a strong need to have one’s suffering recognized. With this need comes a conviction of immaculate morality, a resulting inability to accept criticism or disagreement, and a profound lack of empathy for those perceived as enemies. The researchers also found that people with a victim personality believe themselves justified in taking revenge on those who appear to oppress them. Even when presented with facts and evidence to rebut their beliefs, they are unwilling to relinquish their worldview, which becomes intimately associated with their sense of self. Anger at others and the belief in innocent victimhood create a toxic stew of self-righteousness and moral blindness.

A look at the original paper by the Israeli psychologists (which can be read here) reveals that the ethnic angle did not escape the authors’ attention. They refer explicitly to the cult of the holocaust, and recognize that it can represent a moral hazard for their own people by way of the TIV personality. Good for them: we all know what epithet would have been assigned to any gentile researcher bold enough to make the same point.

Group differences are statistical, and the TIV personality presumably occurs at different rates in different races and ethnicities. It is likely to be elevated among Jews, although it would probably be futile to expect any objective research on this question in our current cultural and intellectual environment. But the TIV type can and does occur within other races.

Indeed, much group conflict over the past forty years has been aptly described as a “victimhood sweepstakes” wherein not only Jews and feminists but blacks, homosexuals, the handicapped, and other identity groups competitively jockey for moral authority by signaling their victimhood. The only group not allowed to participate in the sweepstakes—White, heterosexual, able-bodied men—are by now a distinct minority of the American population (possibly a third). So the increasing prominence of the personality type described by these Israeli researchers would seem to help explain many aspects of our historical moment, and not just feminism or Jewish-gentile conflict.

Anyone who writes against feminism as I do eventually encounters the thesis that it is all simply a product of Jewish subversion, often backed up with long lists of prominent Jewish second-wave feminists. Here is a popular graphic currently doing the rounds on the internet that embodies this thinking:

This view is historically myopic: it requires that one’s familiarity with feminism be limited to the American second wave, usually dated from 1963. But feminist ideas have been widely circulating in the West since the eighteenth century, and not only in the form of Mary Wollstonecraft’s celebrated tract. A review of long-forgotten German debates for and against the “emancipation of women” in the 1780s and -90s, for example, reveal that there is not much novel in twentieth century feminism (cf. Klaus Epstein’s The Genesis of German Conservatism pp. 229–236). Indeed, we have plentiful evidence that similar ideas were discussed in ancient Athens, as witness book 5 of Plato’s Republic and Aristophanes’ comedy The Assemblywomen. Western man did not need the Jews to invent feminism for us.

It remains true, however, that Jews have been massively overrepresented in second wave feminism—by far the most successful version, as they have been in other forms of twentieth-century radicalism, and this calls for explanation. A good place to start might be the work of the above-discussed Israeli psychologists on the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood. If Jews are indeed especially susceptible to this “toxic stew of self-righteousness and moral blindness,” it would explain much of their involvement in destructive movements such as feminism without our having to assume the existence of a conscious conspiracy to subvert alien races.